Report 1643
Special Report #1643 Skillset: Kata Skill: Stealth-Agility Org: Aeromancers Status: Completed Dec 2007 Furies' Decision: Approved in solution 1656 Problem: The 3/8 balance buff available to Stealth monks creates a significant disparity between the damage, bleeding, bruising and affliction rates of monks with access to Stealth and those who don't have access. This is something that will always need to be taken into account when trying to find the "right" rates at which these specs are balanced against one another. With the monk overhaul, the ability to use Boosting to get a 13/13 balance for the current form for 2p presents an interesting choice in combat for monks who want to spend a limited resource to build their offence faster. However, with a 3/8 balance buff on top of other balance buff stacking (including the 1/11 rune) Stealth monks are currently already able to get up to 9 levels (7 fairly easily), making Boosting a lot less impactful as an option. Solution #1: Reduce the balance buff to 2/5. Solution #2: Reduce the balance buff to 2/4. Solution #3: Remove the balance buff and give this skill something else entirely. Player Comments: ---on 3/21 @ 04:01 writes: TLDR - Solutions 1 & 2 are unacceptable for the problem described in the problem statement. The first, and presumably the main problem stated is that there is a disparity between stealth monks and non-stealth monks due to the stealth agility buff. This is factual. However, to resolve this problem, both solutions 1 & 2 fail for two reasons. 1) There will still be a disparity after these solutions: If we add all the defs that a monk can theoretically get (including speed candy, including astrology, including artifact runes) both stealth and harmony monks can get to 9 balance buffs. Of course, that is theoretically possible, but fairly impractical - for both stealth and non-stealth monks. If we only add the defs that can be "easily gotten" - native to the skillsets, a stealth monk can get to 7, and non stealth monks 4. Either 2/5 or 3/6 will still result in a disparity that goes against the problem statement. 2) Neither solutions offer a replacement effect - if a disparity between stealth and non stealth monks in terms of balance buffs is unacceptable, removing the stealth buff entirely is the only real answer - and it must be accompanied with a replacement effect. Without doing so, this becomes a nerf that does only fail to address the problem, and only serves to lessen one of Stealth's few advantages while offering nothing in recompense. This is unacceptable. ---on 3/21 @ 04:01 writes: Next, the last sentence of the problem statement is unquantifiable - the value of boosting is situation. Even if we put it to numbers, it also makes no sense: there is a large difference between a balance buff of 7 and a balance buff of 13 - which is given by Boosting. Specifically, boosting affords an extra 12% extra speed bonus ON TOP of a stealth monk sitting at 7 levels of speed buffs. There is still a huge incentive to use Boosting. If the value of 9 is a problem, a stealth monk also needs to use difficult-to-get buffs to get to 9, which is also possible for non stealth monks. ---on 3/21 @ 04:01 writes: Lastly, this was briefly mentioned in the first comment. Even assuming either of the problems in my previous two comments are valid, a change to address a disparity that is premised on speed buffs being bad must have a replacement. I most certainly am not enamoured of speed buffs, having been one of those who asked for them to be completely eliminated when the overhaul was put in. This case is yet another example of "We're all better off without it entirely." It's not a case where Stealth as a skillset, or Agility as an ability, is overpowered, and thus warrants an unconditional nerf. Any solution that lowers its values without offering recompense is therefore incomplete, and unreasonable. I will put it out here that solution 3 is the only solution I will support anyway, even if solutions 1 and 2 are added with something in the form of compensation - mostly because of my dislike of speed buffs in general. If we're going to do something about it, please don't do a half-hearted effort. But in the absence of any concrete suggestion in Solution 3, it's hardly something I can sign my name to. If you're not interested in putting in the effort, then you're just wasting time. ---on 3/27 @ 22:13 writes: You are right in that solution 2 won't really solve any problems. It was just a suggestion made by Wobou so I included it. My ideal solution is to just delete this ability altogether, but from discussions I've had with you and other Stealth monk users, you already believe Stealth to be useless (despite the prevalence of certain skills like Veil in important combat scenarios like wild nodes). I figured it would be more acceptable to go for a nerf instead. As for solution 1, I believe there is a big difference. 4/4 is what all monks can feasibly get to before accounting for the agility rune. With a rune, 5/11 is possible. The question is how a monk, by themselves, can get that extra point. With solution 1, Stealth monks will not have to worry about it as the 2/5 will cover it. Harmony monks will have to look at one of the other options, but one of them is still pretty readily available, if a bit expensive, which is in the balance candy. There is certainly still a disparity here, but it's not something that cannot be accounted for. This all said, I will be changing solution 2 to make it a 2/4 buff instead. ---on 3/27 @ 22:23 writes: Here is the thing about buffs in the x/y system - not everyone will be able to, or need to, use every single one of these buffs in their class skills to reach the potential maximums. What having these skills does is it 1) provides those who aren't quite as min-maxed with a baseline amount to be buffed with, and 2) provides those who are min-maxed with more options. This is due to the basic concept of opportunity costs - if I don't need to worry about getting that last point to reach 13/13 because I have a skill, I can make a sacrifice to this particular buff with another effect and bring up another number instead. For example, if I can reach 13/13 to electric buff because of my class/city skills then I will not have to worry about using a curio effect to give me more electric buff. Instead, I can set my curio buff to another damage type I might use some of instead, like cold. Indeed, if you think that nerfing a skill like this to not be useful for the outliers is "unacceptable", then we should look at every other skill with buffs under x/y system out there and making sure that those with the skill will always be better off than those without. ---on 3/27 @ 22:30 writes: Agility is, in my opinion, overpowered. You may disagree, but this is the opinion I hold and as a result, I feel that an unconditional nerf is not only warranted, but is entirely necessary. When we are balancing skills and looking at potential nerfs, we don't need to consider any compensation if the overall kit is already considered to be above the "bar" of what is "balanced", i.e. "overpowered". If nerfing a particular skill will not bring the overall kit below this bar then there is no compensation required. In this case, I believe that Stealth will still be fine without the buff from Agility and Stealth monks in general will still be above this bar. I suggested solution 3 because I do understand that Stealth's power is concentrated in a few skills and felt that this is a good opportunity to give Stealth a boost in the form of some utility or other measure that doesn't affect game balance. Stealth isn't a skill that I personally use so I don't really know what kind of skills Stealth users want to use, hence me making solution 3 so that other envoys can throw in ideas. If you don't want to participate in this process that is fine too - I am perfectly fine with just going with my personal preferred solution; deleting this skill entirely. ---on 3/27 @ 22:41 writes: Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that I think it is disingenuous to consider astrology buffs. Not only are astrology buffs not always mechanically available as buffs, but astrologers themselves are not always available. We are considering what Stealth monks can get all the time vs what Harmony monks can get all the time, so bringing up astrology doesn't really stack up. Also, on boosting, there is a difference in opportunity cost when it comes to the use of Boosting at various "resting" levels of balance buffs. Power could be used for other things, so all of this needs to be weighed up. Taking some very rough numbers, Let's say we're comparing even a 3.0s "resting" balance time for one monk vs 2.9s for another monk and Boosting would take them to 2.6s. The first monk would save 0.4s for 2p while the second would save 0.3s for 2p. Of course there is still an incentive for both to use Boosting and in a vacuum this is fine, but power is a finite resource so the monks would need to consider the opportunity costs again. For the first monk, the opportunity cost of not using Boosting is simply higher than the opportunity cost of the second monk not using Boosting. ---on 3/28 @ 07:37 writes: I personally think that /8 is too high for any permanent balance buff (astro, stealth, or otherwise) but I also think that stealth would be lacking in combat tools compared to harmony if the balance bonus was reduced to something like 2/4. I think the ideal bandaid until we can come up with a good active combat skill for stealth would be to make agility a 3/6 bonus. That's still potent and still allows a higher cap than most in the game can hit easily but reduces the distance between the outliers and the baseline. I would be for making this same change to any other long lasting buff that's /7 or greater as well. ---on 3/28 @ 13:26 writes: My idea for Solution 3: Remove balance buff completely. Have it instead remove all hasty messages on movement for 30 seconds - 1 minute after activation. So the stealth user can use it to escape quickly, chase target quickly, get into and out of an spot quickly... break stealth completely in some unforeseen way, quickly. ---on 3/28 @ 13:31 writes: Ultimately I don't feel monks need an extra balance buff. They certainly are not scraping the bottom of the barrel in combat due to a lack of speed. While my above solution may overlap ghostwalk, I also don't feel it would make ghostwalk obsolete. They both have uses. ---on 3/28 @ 17:48 writes: I agree that without this balance buff they wouldn't have as many good direct combat bonuses as Harmony monks, but I think this is really underselling the utility that Stealth provides. Even without considering the prime suspects that always get brought up in Veil/Masquerade/Deepcover, there are also skills like Evade which is is of the few ways you can escape a perfectfifth and Waylay which can be used to set up even better fortress ambushes. ---on 3/28 @ 17:49 writes: Meant to say "Evade, which is one of the few ways you can escape a perfectfifth". I also like Demartel's idea. ---on 3/28 @ 19:27 writes: I don't think we should remove celerity. That can lead to awkward situations like crossing the Basin in literally an instant. (infact this occured with a bug years ago and was funny for a bit, but shouldn't be a thing otherwise). ---on 3/29 @ 06:48 writes: For solution 1, if you're saying that a stealth monk having a 2/5 buff is acceptable because a harmony monk can buy the arti to make up for it, then, what about stealth monks who buy the arti? There's still a disparity that can't be accounted for. So, no, your rationale for solution 1 is entirely illogical. For solution 2, you don't have to put up airs. If you just want to delete it, just say delete it without giving compensation, instead of being facetious in your solutions. I am, naturally, 100%, fully opposed to deleting it without a replacement effect, regardless of what kind of phrasing you want to use. Regarding astrology - I said very clearly, that it is a theoretical accounting of all speed buffs in the game. I also said that it "is theoretically possible, but fairly impractical" - and then showed very clearly what we should be considering: "the defs that can be "easily gotten" - native to the skillsets". I am, in fact, explicitly discounting astrology buffs as something we should consider when looking at the rationale of nerfing this ability based on speed differences: because if we counted it in, then there's zero reason to even change it - and I fully support replacing it. If there's anything "disingenious" about this, it is trying to make it out that I'm counting astrology buffs to justify not changing things when I've stated the contrary multiple times. ---on 3/29 @ 06:48 writes: Next, regarding stealth being overpowered. I'm sorry if you think that current stealth is comparable to harmony in terms of combat because of veil/masquerade/deepcover. As a matter of fact, both veil and deepcover are no longer stealth-only abilities, and are available via artifacts. Yes, they are limited, but the fact remains that the abilities are available to non-stealth users. As an additional kicker, a stealth user with those artifacts get literally no additional advantage - the artifacts don't even give an additional boost to the stealth user. So even in terms of utility, stealth is not even comparable to harmony, since a harmony user can get a boost from those artifacts, but a stealth user can't. Stealth is, in both combat as well as non- combat utility, underpowered, and needs a buff - and don't worry, I most certainly intend on buffing stealth, as I have consistently been doing through several reports. Back to Agility specifically: If speed buffs are unacceptable, sure, remove it. But a removal without a replacement is unacceptable. I mentioned that I will prefer an effect that has some kind of impact on combat over a utility one, but any replacement effect would be better than none. Lastly, evade does not allow you to escape a perfectfifth. That is, however, a perfect idea for an agility replacement. Thanks, I'll take it into consideration when I make my own report. ---on 3/29 @ 06:48 writes: If you can't come up with a replacement because you "don't know what kind of skills Stealth users want", that's fine. You can leave it to people who do, like me. Or you could also leave it to people who are willing to try, like Demartel. Or you could also just make a half-hearted effort and waste time. Doesn't change the fact that none of your solutions as they stand are ones I can support as they stand. ---on 3/31 @ 01:28 writes: Stealth is a skillset comparable to Night where it has very niche uses, but its niche uses are super powerful. I agree that Stealth still has great utility even if agility were nerfed, but I agree that it could use a bit more sprucing up due to many of its skills becoming artifacts, truss being nerfed, and so forth. No problem with super celerity. Also evade doesn't beat pfifth. ---on 4/18 @ 03:28 writes: More utility, less to brute offense. In keeping with "bad guys go offense", lower the number. 1 or 2 is fine. ---on 4/18 @ 04:11 writes: Fine with reduction regardless.